The city, as Lyn Lofland observes, is “a world of strangers, a world populated by persons who are personally unknown to each other.” It is, therefore, easy to become lost: to lose a loved one, or to lose oneself. Surrounded by strangers, one risks becoming an anonymous stranger oneself, seen but not recognized within a faceless sea of humanity.
Several recent Chinese-language movies underscore this fear/fantasy of losing oneself within the anonymous space of a major city, together with the quixotic searches for insignificant individuals which follow. In Ah Nian’s (阿年)Call Me (呼我) (2000), for instance, an itinerant worker (民工) in Beijing uses hand-written posters in an attempt to track down those who might have inadvertently purchased his HIV-tainted blood, while the teenage substitute teacher in Zhang Yimou’s (張藝謀) Not One Less (一個不能少) ultimately appeals to a local television studio in her quest to recover one of her students who has been sent to the city to find work. In Stanley Kwan’s (關錦鵬) 1987 romantic ghost story, Rouge 胭脂扣, meanwhile, the missing person search revolves around a pair of newspaper announcements. First, the ghostly courtesan Fleur (如花) visits a 1980s Hong Kong newspaper office trying to place a classified ad in a contemporary newspaper for her lover, Chen Zhenbang (陈振邦), who ostensibly had committed suicide with her fifty years earlier. The resulting ad, which she is assured will “run in all of Hong Kong’s major newspapers,” reads:
Seeking [missing] Person
Master 12, 3811; I’ll wait for you at the old site
Fleur尋人
十二少，三八一一老地方等你，
如花
In the end, however, it is not this contemporary classified ad which helps Fleur locate her former lover, but rather a short article that her new friends, two contemporary Hong Kong journalists, serendipitously find in a 50-year old issue of a Hong Kong gossip paper (小報) entitled The Bone (骨子). The article reports the attempted suicide, but notes that Fleur’s lover ultimately survived the attempt. It is a direct result of the accidental discovery of this latter article, therefore, that Fleur ultimately succeeds in tracking down Chen Zhenbang, only to discover that what she was actually seeking was a better understanding of herself.
While considerable attention has been given to the role of newspapers in creating and fostering a cult of celebrity—the subject, for instance, of Stanley Kwan’s following film, Center Stage (阮玲玉), about the spectacular mid-1930s suicide of the silent film star Ruan Lingyu as a result of harassment by the press —significantly less attention has been paid to the relationship between the newspapers and a parallel “cult of anonymity.” That is to say, how do newspapers draw attention to possibility of city dwellers’ becoming, not in/famous, but rather anonymous and lost? To the extent that the celebrity exposé is the most visible example of the former phenomenon, the latter phenomenon is illustrated by the “missing persons report”—classified ads taken out by anonymous or unknown readers seeking similarly unknown individuals who have become lost (or lost themselves) in the anonymity of the city.
Taking as my starting point the fictional Fleur’s reliance on newspapers in her search for her 1930s lover, therefore, I will consider here the phenomenon of the “missing persons report” in mid-1930s newspapers. In particular, I will focus on one specific newspaper, Shanghai’s Shenbao 申報 [Shun Pao, in the paper’s own transliteration] during the first few months of 1934. Like the serendipitous discovery of a missing person, the choice here of newspaper, city, and dates are all somewhat arbitrary. For the purposes of our discussion here, 1934 is, as Ray Huang would say, “a year of no significance”—selected simply because it was in March of this year that the fictional Fleur in Stanley Kwan’s film committed suicide. Similarly, countless newspapers from this period ran missing persons announcements and engaged with issues of urban anonymity, but I have chosen to focus on Shenbao both on account of its long history (1872-1949) but also because by the 1930s it had become one China’s of most popular dailies, distributed to 24 of China’s 28 provinces at the time and having a circulation of 100,000-150,000 (and an even larger readership). Finally, while Kwan’s Rouge is itself set in Hong Kong, meanwhile, my focus here on Shanghai is intended to provide a convenient counterpoint to the obsession with the celebrity which crystallized around Ruan Lingyu’s suicide in Shanghai precisely one year later.
On Urban Anonymity:
The anonymity, alienation, and mutual estrangement associated with the modern metropolis are arguably not merely an inevitable component of modern urban life, but a necessary one as well. As George Simmel argues in The Philosophy of Money, for instance, the anonymity embodied in people “completely indifferent to us” constitutes a crucial precondition upon which the modern economic relations of the modern city are modeled. That is to say, the sorts of economic relationships which help to define the modern city are themselves predicated on an ideal of anonymity, of a relationship between two individuals who are completely unknown to each other.
At the same time, however, the resulting feelings of estrangement and alienation are ones which must be partially sublimated in order for urbanites to come to identify with the city they inhabit. For instance, we may extrapolate from Benedict Anderson’s well-known observations about national consciousness and suggest that metropolitan affiliation and urban identity is, in effect, a form of “imagined community,” facilitated by the role of newspapers and other mass media in fostering a sense of “imaginary” affiliation with the “thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence [the city dweller] is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” More generally, Anderson suggests that it is precisely out of the systematic sense of “estrangement” engendered by the technologies of modern life, that a new “conception of personhood, identity” is born.
By this logic, then, an urban consciousness is necessarily located on the knife edge of simultaneously sublimating and reinstating the anonymous relations which are at the heart of those communities. One early model for this sort of conflicted and paradoxical attitude toward urban estrangement and alienation can be found in Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the flâneur’s fantasy of being able to lose himself in an anonymous urban crowd while at the same time retaining a crucial critical distance from that same crowd. In this way, “The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur.” As philosopher Zygmunt Bauman elaborates more recently, “the city stroller can go on drawing the strangers around him into his private theatre without fear that those drawn inside will claim the rights of … insiders.”
This figure of the flâneur, in turn, provides, as Susan Buck-Morss notes, “the prototype of a new form of salaried employee who produces news/literature/advertisements for the purpose of information/entertainment/persuasion—these forms are not clearly distinguished.” In other words, the flâneur’s perambulations through the city anticipate those of the modern reporter, and therefore by implication the newspaper itself functions as a sort of virtual flânerie. If the act of reading the newspaper, then, constitutes a vicarious process of losing oneself within a sea of anonymous strangers, the paradigmatic moment of such a process would naturally be found in reading about strangers who have literally become lost (or have deliberately lost themselves) in the city.
Shenbao’s inaugural issues:
Founded in 1872 by the British merchant Ernest Major, the Shanghai-based newspaper Shenbao was from the very beginning a hybrid, modeling itself on a variety of sources including European newspapers, official court gazettes (京報), as well as local gazetteers (地方志). Shenbao remained foreign-owned until 1908 but, unlike many other early Chinese newspapers founded by missionaries, it was, as Barbara Mittler observes, “free of the ideological burdens associated with missionary or advocacy papers in China” during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The initial issues of Shenbao were divided into two typographically distinct sections consisting of articles and classified ads, respectively. Both of these sections, however, were actually quite heterogeneous, with the former including a wide array of material, including news articles reminiscent of the factual reports found in traditional chronologies or the jingbao, examples of poetic diction and polemical prose that usually appear under the headings of shuo (說) and lun (論), and tales of retribution and of strange happenings featuring techniques and writing styles reminiscent of Chinese literary and fictional genres.
The classified ads, meanwhile, included both personal announcements as well as a variety of business and corporate advertisements. Over time, however, these two categories gradually became increasingly differentiated, with the news divided into international, national, and local news, dealing with political, social, and media topics. The “amusing subject matter and wondrous relations of no political import” which were, during the early years of the paper, intermixed with the “news,” were by 1912 largely relegated to the “Free Talk” (自由談) section of the paper. Similarly, the classifieds section (分類廣告) eventually came to be subdivided by topic, and part of it was cleaved off into a separate “urgent classifieds” (緊要分類廣告) section, while many of the more corporate advertisements were eventually removed from the classifieds section altogether and presented as actual advertisements. While many of the news articles and advertisements centered around prominent figures in politics and the media, the shorter local news stories and many of the classifieds, by contrast, tended to feature individuals who were essentially unknown, anonymous, and/or lost.
Missing persons announcements, for instance, had appeared regularly in Shenbao virtually since its very first issue, with the earliest such announcement appearing on the last page of the seventh issue, published on May 12th, 1872 (壬申年四月初五日). Labeled simply “seeking [missing] person” [尋人; hereafter “missing person” for short], this announcement was an appeal for the return of a runaway t
teenage girl:
Seeking [missing] Person
A fifteen years old girl has run away (走失), wearing a gold and silver-patterned shirt and pants, red cloth shoes, hair in two buns, and wearing “autumn leaf” earrings….尋人
走失女子一名年十五歲身穿金銀布衫褲足著紅布鞋頭挽雙魚髻耳帶秋葉。。。
Based on her attire and adornments (e.g., her gold and silver clothing; her fancy earrings, etc.), this teenager was probably a concubine. Her name is not mentioned anywhere in the announcement, nor is that of the person seeking her return (instead, an address is provided to which information concerning her whereabouts may be sent). The announcement, however, does close with a quasi-signature: “Solemnly announced by the missing [person’s] owner/master ” (失主謹啟). This explicit assertion of “ownership/mastery” (主) over the girl, in turn, resonates with what had already become, in the scant two weeks since Shenbao was founded, a distinctive feature of its nascent classifieds pages: the “missing promissory/bank-note” (失票) announcements. Indeed, on the first of the two consecutive daily postings of the preceding “missing person” announcement, the same classifieds section carried no less than three “missing banknote” announcements, each of which had already been running for several consecutive issues. Unlike the missing person announcement, however, the goal of these latter missing banknote announcements was not so much the recovery of the lost property itself, but rather to notify other businesses that the owner had already annulled the note and therefore it should not be accepted as legal tender.
The next “missing person” announcement in Shenbao appeared two weeks later, on May 28th, and proceeded to run for another six consecutive issues. The missing individual this time is a young girl:
Lost Little Girl
At 6:00 on the 17th [of this month], the writer, surnamed Gao, lost a seven year old girl, who goes by the name of Ah Bao. On April 21st of last year, her mother passed away, and now she is raised by her grandmother. She has a scar in her eye, and if anyone should see her and notify me, I will thank them in person. If someone should find her and brings her home, I will thank them repeatedly in person.失去小女孩
啟者高姓於十七日六點鐘不見一七歲小女孩名阿寶其母於去年四月十一日去世現在為祖母撫養其女眼中有疤如有人看見送信者當面謝如有人領回者當面重謝
In contrast to the stark minimalism of the first announcement, this latter one is curiously chatty, full of extraneous information (it is not clear, for instance, how the precise date of the mother’s death could possibly help someone locate her, unless it was intended to elicit sympathy for her predicament). Unlike the concubine announcement, however, this latter announcement provides virtually no information about the girl’s dress or appearance, pointing only to the “scar in her eye” (眼中有疤). Apparently intended to help readers identify the girl, this reference to the scar is also a potential distraction (is the scar congenital, the result of an accident, or possibly a sign of abuse?), while at the same time symbolizing the girl’s current invisibility within the public “eye.” It is striking, for instance, the sentence immediately following this description of the girl’s scarred eye is precisely an appeal to anyone who might happen to “see” (看見) her.
Both of these announcements are inflected, in different ways, with considerations of commoditization and (monetary) value. On the second day of the “lost girl” announcement, for instance, the announcement was immediately flanked by two additional “lost property” announcements: one announcing the loss of yet another promissory note (失期票) and, immediately below it, another concerning a “lost object” (失物): a white jade tablet with a calligraphic inscription on one side and a portrait on the other (白玉牌一個一面有篆書一面有人物). While the missing girl with the scarred eye is obviously not a piece of property in the same way that the promissory note or the jade tablet are, the parallels between the announcements, together with their physical proximity on the printed page, implicitly suggest that the young girl, too, is embedded within an quasi-economic traffic in women. In this sense, it is ironically appropriate that the girl’s name is given as Ah Bao (阿寶), or literally, “precious treasure.”
Missing in 1934
By the mid-1930s, missing persons announcements were distributed among several different sections of Shenbao, including the “urgent classifieds,” the regular classifieds, as well as a separate, untitled announcement/advertisement section. Unlike this last section, which could extend for an entire page or more with entries consisting of elongated columns of text with a wide variety of font sizes and formatting, the classifieds (both “urgent” and regular), by contrast, typically occupied only a third or half a page, their individual entries were usually nearly square and their fonts and formatting comparatively standardized. This systematization of the classifieds also extended to the subcategories into which the individual entries were organized, including “requests” (徵求), “notices” (聲明), announcements (啟事), etc., and almost always in that order. These classifieds typically included announcements of job announcements, obituaries, divorces, etc., but the missing persons announcements typically appeared under the “requests” (徵求) heading at the very beginning of the “urgent classifieds.” The missing person announcements appearing in the regular classifieds and in the general announcement/advertisement section, however, were not similarly prioritized—appearing anywhere within the section, and often lacking an explicit “missing person” (尋人) title (or equivalent).
During the first few months of 1934, dozens of people were reported missing in the pages of the Shenbao. Of these missing persons, many were young women like those discussed in the inaugural issues of the paper. For instance, on January 6th of 1934, an announcement appeared in the regular classifieds for a maidservant (女僕) by the name of Cuicui (翠翠) who, at three in the afternoon of December 12th , left home heading north and disappeared without a trace (往北走失無蹤). She is described as being “19 years old, but looking older” (年十九而較為老相). Information about her whereabouts will be rewarded with 20 silver dollars, and anyone returning her safely would be rewarded with 50 silver dollars (洋元; hereafter referred to simply as dollars). Two days later, the “urgent classifieds” ran a “missing person” announcement that an 18 year old girl by the name of Xinghua 杏花 was also “missing” (走失). The poster is described as being “extremely heartbroken” (悲痛萬分) at being unable to find the girl, and offers a 10 dollar reward for information concerning her whereabouts, and 20 dollars for her return. Right next to this announcement, meanwhile, is a “missing person, reward” (尋人償格) announcement regarding yet another “missing” (走失) girl—this one a 12 year old by the name of Jin Wenxiu (金文秀). This latter announcement is then followed by a detailed description of her appearance and clothing, and the announcement concludes with a promise of a reward (酬) (amount not specified) for either information about her whereabouts or for her safe return.
Although only the first of the three preceding announcements explicitly specifies the servant status of the missing girl, the other two are quite likely also for servants or concubines—as suggested by such factors as their names (e.g., 杏花, or “apricot flower”), the absence of any substantive discussion of the girls’ identities, together with the authors’ comparative matter-of-factness regarding the circumstances surrounding the women’s disappearance (both are simply described as having simply “disappeared” [走失], with no further explanation). This presumption that many of these missing young women are actually servants or concubines who are fleeing their masters is ironically underscored in another “missing person” announcement which appeared a few days later, on Jan. 13th and 14th. The announcement begins by explicitly stating the woman’s relationship with the poster:
[My] granddaughter (外孫女) Shi Shuyan (石叔嚴), who this year is 21 years old, with a short and squat physique and a Northern accent, went out in afternoon of the fifth of this month, and never returned…
外孫女石叔嚴現年二十一歲身材矮胖北方口音於本月五號下午外出未歸。。。
Despite the emphasis on the woman’s kinship relationship to the author, the structure of the announcement mimics very closely that of the other announcements for missing concubines/servants—including its emphasis on the woman’s external attributes, its lack of additional information about the woman’s identity, together with the relatively modest reward for her return (as with Xinghua’s announcement above, the poster offers 10 dollars for information regarding Shi Shuyan’s whereabouts, and 20 dollars for her return). It therefore seems rather likely that this announcement, like the preceding ones, similarly involves a search for a truant concubine, rather than for a lost 21 year old granddaughter.
While some of these missing women are clearly servants and concubines who have run away, and others are actual relatives who (for whatever reason) have disappeared, it is likely that some of the rest disguise themselves as announcements for relatives when in fact the missing individuals are actually servants. One of the issues here is presumably an attempt to have announcements included in the more selective and visible “urgent classifieds” section, which appears to give priority to announcements about individuals who appear to be actually lost, as opposed to those who have fled (and consequently are sought for the monetary value they represent).
These issues of commodity value are illustrated particularly clearly in a pair of announcements appearing on Feb. 17. The first announcement (with photograph) concerns a missing 12 year old Indian boy by the name of Landuola (印人藍多拉年十二歲) who had disappeared in May of 1933 (more than eight months prior to the announcement), and stating that anyone finding him “within the next twenty days” would be rewarded with fifteen dollars (suggesting that he was a servant whose term of employment was perhaps about to expire). This oddly cavalier announcement is then directly juxtaposed with another curious variant on the genre of the “massing person” report:
Missing Dog
At eleven in the morning on the sixteenth of this month, a little foreign dog disappeared near the milk stand at Lufei Street. The dog’s fur is between grey and black in color, and if anyone knows of its whereabouts or returns it to its owner, they will be rewarded.尋犬
本月十六日上午十一時在露飛路可的牛奶棚附近走失小洋犬一頭毛色灰黑相間如有人知其下落或將該犬送歸失主者當有酬謝
Not only does the character for “dog” (犬) resemble that for “person” (人), furthermore the body of the latter announcement mimics, with perhaps unintentional irony, the rhetorical conventions of the typical “missing persons” report (including both the information about the circumstances of the dog’s disappearance, together with the promise of a reward for either information about the dog’s current location or its safe return). The implicit anthropomorphization of the dog, therefore, stands in ironic contrast to the parallel reification of the servants and concubines in the same sorts of announcements.
While all of the preceding missing person announcements are framed in the third person, others instead address themselves in the second person (汝) directly to the missing individuals in question. For instance, the following announcement from March 22nd stresses the author’s relationship to the individual be sought:
Seeking Zheng Rui, Son
After you left the store, we have found no trace of you. The entire family is distraught. Send your address quickly, and all issues can be discussed. The important thing is that you be sure not to go astray.正瑞兒覽
汝離店後音信查無闔家焦急速示地址萬事皆可商量切勿走入迷途為要
This impact of this emotional plea for the son’s return, however, is mitigated somewhat when one realizes that this announcement, like virtually all of the ones discussed in this essay, builds on a set of a established rhetorical conventions. For instance, the wording used here echoes that of another announcement that appeared a few days earlier on March 15th, which similarly entreats a wayward daughter to return home so that the parents can make amends:
Dear/Seeking Hui Zhen, Daughter
From when you left, your mother has been waiting very anxiously, becoming half-crazed in the process. After reading your letter, [I] understand everything now, and trust that we can discuss everything positively and find a solution. When you see this newspaper, please immediately return home.慧珍女兒鑒 〔 覽 〕,
自汝出外後母親等萬分焦急如瘋如癡閱汝之信一切明瞭現雙方積極相商當可解決見報速即歸家
The preceding two announcements (both from the urgent classifieds), in turn, appear to echo a third, earlier, announcement which appeared in the announcement/advertisement section of February 26’s paper:
Seeking Information on He Hongcheng, Son
From the moment you left without saying goodbye on the 16th of this month, the entire family has been extremely distraught. Father has sent people looking for you in all directions, but they have not turned up any trace. Your mother, meanwhile, has been crying day and night until both eyes are cried out, and furthermore she has not been able to eat or drink. We are even worried for her life. After seeing this newspaper advertisement, please, if you remember the affection with which we raised you, please, together with the other four men, come back home immediately, in order to save your mother’s life. If you are dissatisfied with anything, we can certainly discuss it after you come home. Please return if you wish, or otherwise send us a letter informing us of your whereabouts. Your parents are anxious [for your return].賀鴻程兒悉
自汝於本月十六日下午不別而出走後闔家焦急萬分父曾派人四出〔處〕找尋不見蹤跡汝母竟日夜啼哭雙目已哭壞且飲食不進生命堪慮見報後如念養育之情希即偕同其餘四人火速回家以救汝母之命如有不滿意之事儘可回家商量自能順從汝意否則亦希函告現在何處稍慰親心切切
Not only do all three of these announcements use a second person address (all using the more classical 汝 pronoun for “you”), but furthermore they share the same grammatical structure of the title, a distinct melodramatic air (particularly the emphasis on distraught mothers), as well as specific turns of phrase within the body of the announcements (e.g., the emphasis on the family’s distress [in chronological order]: “闔家焦急萬分,” “萬分焦急,” and “闔家焦急”). Perhaps as a result of the second-person address, each of these announcements is unusually attentive not only to the possibility of having a dialogue after the person’s return (e.g., “回家商量,” “雙方積極相商,” and “萬事皆可商量”), but also to the status of the missing person announcement as itself a form of communication (e.g., “見報後〔希即〕火速回家,” and “見報速即歸家”), as well as the exchange of other letters and notes either prior to or as a response to the missing person announcement itself (e.g., “希函告現在何處,” “閱汝之信一切明瞭,” and “速示地址”).
The Feb. 26th announcement, meanwhile, introduces another complication of its own. Embedded within the long, emotional plea for the son’s return is a somewhat enigmatic reference to the “other four people” (其餘四人) with whom He Hongcheng’s father hopes he will return home. More information about Hongcheng and his companions may be found in another, at first sight, unrelated advertisement positioned directly beside the first. Prefaced with a standard “Missing person” (尋人) title followed by three separate photographs (one below another), the announcement begins:
Here are He Hongcheng, 16 years old (see image 1): Wu Jiaqing, 22 years old (see image 2) : Chen Yan??, nineteen years old (see image 3); as well as He Hongcao, nineteen years old, and Cai Bende, twenty years old. On the sixteenth of this month, these five fled together while trying to evade someone. If anyone notices these five people, please send a letter informing [us]…
茲有賀鴻程十六歲（見圖一）吳家卿廿二歲 （見圖二）陳延？十九歲（見圖三）以及 賀鴻操十九歲蔡本德廿一歲 五人於月之十六日避人一同出走如有人發見以上五人來信報知。。。
The announcement goes on to offer a 50 dollar reward for information about these five men, and 100 dollars for their return. Apparently, therefore, these young men (all in their late teens and early twenties) fled together, perhaps after having committed a crime. One mystery which remains unexplained, however, is why the first announcement, apparently posted by Hongcheng’s father, speaks so fervently about Hongcheng’s return, but omits any reference to the nineteen year old He Hongcao, who fled with Hongcheng and is almost certainly his brother or cousin. The stark contrast in the attitudes toward these two He brothers/cousins, therefore, parallels the diametrically opposed tone of these two juxtaposed announcements, further underscoring the degree to which (regardless of whether the first announcement is in fact genuine or, equally plausible, is merely a ruse to lure He Hongcheng out) the apparent intimacy conveyed through this paradigmatically anonymous medium is, necessarily, an imaginary construction.
Paralleling the missing persons reports, meanwhile, are the daily announcements of “found” children. These announcements—which by the mid-1930s comprised daily notices of three separate found children—appear on the title “Found” (招领) and are prefaced with the suggestion that “For those who may have lost a boy or girl, please attend to the society bureau announcements appearing in this space” (如有走失男女者请注意此处地位社会局啟). Described in terms not unlike those of the “lost” persons reports, the infants and children in these announcements are ones who have been found lost or abandoned, and turned in to orphanages. With numbing regularity, these children appear, day after day, their individuality signaled by miniature photographs and the careful descriptions of their appearance, while at the same time being subsumed by the very repetitiveness of the announcements themselves.
Furthermore, the frequent use of photographs in both these “found children” and “missing person” announcements—and, indeed, these were the only two sections of the paper during this period to consistently feature photographs—obviously attempts to differentiate the (lost or found) persons, but when viewed collectively these photographs come to assume the quality of an anonymous photographic archive, an attempt to erase individual difference by subsuming it with a broader view of the population as a whole.
The logical extension of these “found children” announcements, in turn, can be found in another regularly-appearing item in the paper during this period—an item which, on this particular day, happened to be positioned directly above and beside the found children announcement. This second item is the “Public Settlements Board of Works hygiene report: infectious disease statistics ” (公共租界工部局衛生報告：傳染病統計), a statistical summary of the illnesses and deaths in the city, broken down by category, over the course of the preceding week.
At one level, this sort of statistical summary represents the logical culmination of the of the logic of both the “missing person” and “found children” announcements. Whereas the latter types of announcements use identifiable individuals in order to convey the sense of the city’s vast anonymity (and, implicitly, of the inherent possibility that any reader, or family member, might similarly become “lost” in the city), the statistical summary quite literally strips individuals of their original identities, reducing them to nameless, faceless masses. At one level, this reliance on statistical anonymity to convey a sense of the “identity” of the city can be seen in the context of what Ian Hacking describes as the late nineteenth century triumph of statistics over determinism. At another level, meanwhile, this statistical summary of infectious diseases (傳染病) constitutes an ironic metaphor for the newspaper’s own explicit goal of disseminating the news (傳播新息), in the sense that the dissemination of the news via a public organ like Shenbao is made possible via a double process of abstraction and reidentification. In other words, just as the statistical summary of infectious diseases first strips its victims of their original identities before reassigning them new “identities” based on the nature of the etiology of their diseases, similarly a news organ such as a newspaper has the potential to help construct a public by first reminding readers with the inherently anonymous quality of urban existence, while simultaneously affirming their “new” identities as inhabitants of the city or nation.
While some missing persons might, if they were lucky, later appear in the “found children” section of the paper, others were presumably not so fortunate, in the sense that their next appearance within the public eye of the paper might very well be as unidentified bodies. These announcements of found corpses would typically appear in Shenbao’s local news section—a lively collection of short, elliptical reports of countless cases of robberies, rapes, murders, suicides, which often read like a 1930s Shanghai version of Law and Order. The names and identifying characteristics of the individuals concerned, both victims and accused, are carefully noted, though presumably most of them were unknown to the vast majority of Shenbao’s readers. The exception to this rule of carefully naming all relevant individuals was, of course, the accounts of unidentified corpses. For instance, on March 1st there was a brief report of a “floating male corpse” (男性浮屍) found in the northern suburbs of Songjiang (松江), just as, on March 22, the corpse of a male murder victim (被害男屍) was found in Jiashan (嘉善). In the same vein, on April 4th, a longer article reported the “discovery of a female corpse” (發現一女屍) on Wusong Rd. The article’s subheading describes the anonymous victim as “resembling a Japanese in both her hair [style] and facial appearance, and tests revealed that she had died from a pulmonary infection (面貌頭髮頗似日人，驗係患有肺病身死). The following article then provides additional details, such as the fact that a Japanese outfit was found next to her, that the middle finger of her left hand had “already broken off” (已斷去), and the corpse had been sent to the morgue while the authorities were “awaited confirmation of her citizenship before matching records” (待查明國籍再行核辦).
One particularly striking example of this phenomenon of the “found corpse” can be found in a brief January 14th report of the discovery of the girl’s body underneath the ice of a river. It turns out, however, that this corpse (屍身) actually belonged to a Jiangdu county middle school student by the name of Zhang Yanglan:
Missing Female Student’s Corpse Discovered
The female student Zhang Yanglan, in her first year at Jiangdu county’s public middle school last fall, ran away on account of having twice failed her school’s monthly exams, and furthermore left behind suicide notes, which she sent to her classmate Cao Wenlan, and others. Her father subsequently sent people to search for her everywhere, and also put out “missing person/reward” leaflets….失蹤女生屍身發現
江都縣立中學秋季一年級女生張養蘭、前因在校兩次月考、未曾及格 乃羞念出走、並留下絕命書、分致其同學曹文蘭等、嗣經其家長派人四出追尋、並出賞格尋人傳單…
While we have no reason to doubt the inherent truth of this news story, it is nevertheless significant that it simultaneously fulfills a compelling fantasy, bringing the “lost body” (走「失」的「身」體) of the typical missing persons announcement back in touch with the “lost identity” of the typical “[found] corpse” (屍身) report.
Coda: One Day in Shanghai:
The dialectic of celebrity and anonymity examined in this essay, in turn, is developed most memorably in a reportage project which Mao Dun undertook in the mid-1930s, entitled One Day in China (中國的一日). Mao Dun’s inspiration for this was project was Gorki’s similarly-conceived “One Day in the World” project, which he had initially proposed in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. Gorki’s project consisted of selecting a day (Sept. 27, 1935) at random, and then bringing together a rich selection of news relating to that day from around the world.
Mao Dun then translated the prospectus for the “One Day in the World” project into Chinese in March, 1936 (almost precisely one year after Ruan Lingyu’s suicide, and two years after the fictional Fleur’s own suicide), and proposed a similar project in China centered around a randomly-selected date: May 21st, 1936. Unlike Gorki’s project, which ended up using primarily published newspaper articles from the day in question, May Dun hoped instead to have as broad a cross-section as possible of China’s population describe their activities on that particular “day of no significance.” In late May, therefore, the project’s coordinators posted advertisements in Shenbao (on May 18, 20, and 21, 1936) and other periodicals, stating the project’s goal of “reveal[ing] the entire face of China during one day,” and expressing hope that “all writers and unpublished writers who support this project of ours will attention to all events big or small on May twenty-first that are experienced or observed either on or off the job and will write down their impressions (in a maximum of two thousand words).” The result was more than 3000 essays describing their authors’ activities on that particular day. Mao Dun and his fellow editors then selected 801 essays for inclusion in the One Day in China volume, focusing in particular on contributors for whom this would be their first time in print.
Mao Dun’s “one day in China” project, therefore, features written contributions from hundreds (or thousands, if you include the unpublished essays) of individuals who were previously anonymous or invisible in the public eye, and publicizes them precisely on account of their “anonymity.” Viewed collectively, therefore, this faceless individuals, then come together to constitute an image of “the collective face of China”—an imaginary community predicated precisely on the foregrounding, and consequent sublimation, of individual anonymity.
You'd been missed.
Posted by: nnyhav | December 12, 2006 at 09:49 AM
nnyhav,
many thanks.
more to come.
take care,
carlos
Posted by: crojas | December 12, 2006 at 09:53 AM